Lo Smog

The other day as I was walking home from work along the main road, I noticed that I wasn't breathing properly. Not in an, "Oh no, I'm about to have a heart attack!" kind of a way, more the way I used to breath walking through the smoking section of a restaurant when people were still allowed to smoke in restaurants.

But I wasn't in a restaurant. I was out in the open air.

I wrote the other day about how terrible the air quality is in Milan. In fact, this is such an obsession that approximately 5% of my blog posts have been about the pollution here. The latest news is that Italy, having exceeded the safe EU limits for air pollution in Milan for the past 4 years, is about to be taken to the European court of justice and will in theory be made to pay millions of euros in fines if they don't solve the problem.

Unfortunately, they have until 2011 to do it and I'll either have left or died of lung cancer, so in the meantime, I've taken to walking the back streets to school. The air there is a little bit easier to breathe, but it takes extra oxygen to jump around the dog shit. If you've ever moaned about the crottes de chien in Paris, you should see Milan.

The X Factor

As a way of avoiding the mounds of paperwork that I should be doing tonight, I'm watching the Italian X Factor.

The show was opened by the UK singer Seal. He came on stage and spoke in English. The presenter spoke back to him in English. One of the Italian judges asked him the question "Do you think I'm sexy?" Throughout all of this, a little bit of what was said was translated into almost inaudible Italian. The rest wasn't.

This leads me to two possible conclusions. One is that the producers of RAI television believe that all the people in Italy who watch The X Factor are fluent in English. The other is that on the X Factor it doesn't matter what you say as long as you look good and sound cool.

The programme has been on for about 20 minutes now and there's been about 30 seconds of the contestants singing. The rest is the judges arguing with each other and interrupting a lot.

Burns' Night

Last weekend, as my fellow Scots across the world were reading poetry to lumps of sheeps' innards and birling each other dizzy on the dancefloor, I did something different. I had a crêpe party.

The original inspirations for the party were Normandy cider bought from the artisan fair at Christmas and the availability of sarrasin flour in the shops, but these aspects of the party both failed due to my English friends having been put off cider by drinking too much White Lightning in bus stops at age 14 and by me doing my shopping in the GS supermarket rather than the French-owned Auchan. The authenticity of the occasion was further depleted by the guests being 50% vegetarian, meaning that many of the traditional French fillings were off the menu for them. We did, however, have a fabulous baked Camembert (I don't know if the French actually do this to Camembert but Mr A made one with herbs and olive oil and it was amazing) and a real Béchamel sauce. (Mr A, backed up by Wikipedia, taught me the difference between Béchamel and white sauce. I proceeded to ruin his creation by making it lumpy.) We bought cheese at both the market and the supermarket and at one point it was filling two shelves in the fridge. For the sweet crêpes, we had Nutella (Italian in origin but beloved by the French), lemons and sugar, and strawberries and banana flambéed in Amaretto.

I might not have eaten haggis at the weekend, but the fusion cuisine more than made up for the loss.

From the Italian News

Three stories from the UK made the evening TV news tonight. In order of priority:

Prince Harry and Chelsy Davy have broken up. She is now listed as “single” on Facebook.

People are now flocking to Britain to buy cheap Aston Martin cars in London.

Something about underwater ironing. My vocabulary wasn't specialised enough to understand the finer details.

It's Getting Harder and Harder to Breathe

In the newspaper last week it said that air quality levels in Milan had been safe on only two days since the beginning of this year's records. The rest of the time, pollution was up to three times higher than the safe level.

No wonder I've started coughing again.

Taking Life as it Comes

It occurred to me this weekend that it's been a while since I posted anything about what I've actually been doing when I'm not falling out with Italian customer services staff or musing about their communicative habits. Then I realised that there wasn't actually that much to say. Life is very normal and that's a good thing.

I came to Italy with a mission to learn to speak Italian and to experience as much as possible of the country and the culture in the nine months that followed. I felt claustrophobic spending too much time with my colleagues outside of work. I started going to conversation classes and joined a hillwalking club. I bought lots of newspapers and made a point of watching the news every evening I was at home. I was really happy, but life was also hard work.

Now I feel like I've relaxed a lot. I've made some good friends among the people I work with and met my English speaking boyfriend. I'm still learning Italian but I've accepted that it's not going to happen as quickly as it would if I were working in an Italian company or had hundreds of Italian friends. I need to motivate myself to actually study it, but I speak it pretty much every day and I hear it all around me, so something must be going in.

Part of the reason for this, I think, is that I've realised that I can stay here as long as I want. I like my job and I can probably stay on next year, so I have plenty of time to explore Italy. Not being totally immersed in the langauge and culture might make my learning curve a bit slower but it also makes life a lot easier.

So what have I actually been doing? Working hard. Spending time with Mr A. Planning a skiing holiday for February. Meeting up with friends. Going to conversation classes. Teaching English conversation classes. Reading the free newspaper in the metro. Watching the weather forecast in the hope that it's going to snow again.

My life might not be 100% Italian, but it's good.

Misadventures in the Italian Language

Once I had recovered from the shock of my experience with Alice Mobile's “Customer Services” the other day, I realised that my conversation with the woman on the other end raised some interesting sociolinguistic questions.

One of the things that shocked me almost as much as the price of their internet services was the fact that the woman interrupted me when I was speaking. In the UK, that almost never happens, unless the customer is truly ranting, raving and being abusive. In Italy, however, it is generally much more socially acceptable to interrupt and speak when someone else is speaking. (Try dealing with that with a class of 25 children with very loud voices!). What I wonder, therefore, is, would the woman have done that if we had been speaking in English?

Lots of my English speaking friends, even the ones that speak Italian, ask to speak in English in situations like this. I've always tried to speak in Italian, partly because I want to, but also because I've always thought that I'll get better service that way. Maybe this comes from living in France, where people tend to look down their noses at you if you don't have a perfect accent, never mind if you have the audacity to try to speak in English, or maybe it's because I think that if you make the transaction more difficult for them by carrying it out in a foreign language, they're more likely to give up on you when it gets complicated. Other friends in Italy have told me, however, that they've always had good customer service when they've spoken in English, perhaps because Italians are usually proud that they speak English and keen to be able to help by using it.

What I was really wondering, though, was whether, in the same situation, my woman's attitude would have changed if she had been speaking English. When you speak another language, do you take on some of the characteristics of its native speakers? I've noticed that some of my anglophone friends who have been in France a long time don't just sound French when they speak French, they act it as well. In Italian, I felt it was acceptable to interrupt this woman after she had interrupted me, which I wouldn't have done in English. I suspect that if she had actually lived in an anglophone country and picked up its sociolinguistic rules as well as the language, she wouldn't have.

Alice and Tim - Don't Go With Those Two!

One of the great things about having a blog is that you can mouth off in public about things that annoy you. I try not to do this too often, mostly because it's boring to read, but this might actually be useful to somebody, so here goes.

When I first came to Italy, I decided to get mobile internet through a company called Wind. Other people I know have had no problems with their technology, but for some reason, it didn't work on my computer and, after spending a fortune in internet credit without getting an internet connection in return, I decided to try another company.

I bought a modem and sim card from Alice, which is the internet branch of the company Tim, which in turn is owned by Telecom Italia. I got them from a shop owned by a friend of a friend and she was very helpful, gave me good advice and let me try the equipment in advance. I signed up for a promotion that gave me 9GB fror 25 euros a month.

For the first month, it worked really well. Then, as the month drew to an end, I bought new credit for the sim card ready for the next month.

The day after the second month was supposed to start, I tried to connect to the internet. It worked for about 20 minutes, then stopped. I phoned up to check the credit and discovered that I had none.

When I came back from my Christmas trip home, I bought some more credit, topped up the sim and connected to the internet. 2 minutes later, my 5 euros of credit was gone.

I waited two days for the customer helpline to be open and phoned them up. I explained very politely that 35 euros of credit seemed to have disappeared without a trace. The woman explained that when you top up the credit, you also have to request the "promotion" (eg the 9GB of downloads per month) every time. This was not written in any documents that I received from the shop but I politely admitted that it was my fault and asked her to explain where the credit had gone, if it hadn't been spent on renewing my "promotion". Her response was that I had been on the internet since the promotion ran out.

"Yes," I agreed, "but I had 5 euros of credit and I was only connected for 2 minutes. I don't understand how 2 minutes of internet time can cost 5 euros."

At this point the woman got seriously ratty. She told me it wasn't her job to convince me of anything, nor to listen to what I had to say. Somewhere in a few seconds of us speaking over each other in very loud, very fast and in my case probably very poor Italian, she told me that being connected to the internet without a "promotion" costs 7 euros for every megabyte. Then she put the phone down on me.

Luckily, the understanding and technologically savvy Mr A was on hand to give me a hug after this traumatising experience and to confirm that at that rate on a high speed connection, 2 minutes of being connected to the internet could indeed cost 5 euros. And that, my friends, corresponds to a rate of a hundred and fifty euros per hour.

If I wasn't in Italy, I would write to the company and complain about the rude woman.

If I wasn't in Italy, I would contact trading standards.

Being in Italy, I sucked it up, renewed the promotion for January and moaned about it on my blog instead.

Venezia

One of the best things about living in Milan is how easy it is to get out of Milan. With a few days to spare before work started after new year, Mr A and I did some quick research on the internet, booked a hotel and got on a train. Within a couple of hours, we had gone from Milan, the ugly economic and industrial powerhouse of Italy and perhaps the only place in the whole country where things actually work, to glorious, historical, impractical Venice.

We had both been to Venice before, but only in the summer, when the temperatures are high and the crowds are stifling. On a January evening, the remains of a snowfall were still lying on the streets, which were deserted to the point of being eerie, and gondolas slipped through the mist, seen and then unseen in the patchy light.

In the morning, the weather was bright and clear and we set out into the city. One of the best things to do in Venice is just walk, and that is what we did. Even in the crowded areas, it was relaxing to wander without the noise and the chaos of the Milanese traffic. I do wonder, though, how on earth people do things like moving house in Venice, where there are so many buildings you can't even get to by boat, never mind by car or with a lorry.
We arrived at Piazza San Marco at the end of the morning, visited the basilica and climbed the Campanile. The Campanile is a 100m high bell tower that has spectacular views all over Venice and across the lagoon to the mainland. Unfortunately, the winds at 100m were bitingly cold and we physically couldn't stand to stay up there for long but it was worth it all the same.

In the afternoon we had time to do some more walking and buy the incredibly expensive nougat for which Venice is famous before warming ourselves up with hot chocolate and getting the train back to Milan.

Il Capodanno a Milano

I flew back to Milan on the afternoon of the 31^st December. At the airport, I was struck by the number of Scottish men striding around the place in kilts (always a nice send-off) and assumed that they were probably off to wreak havoc in the bars and piazzas of any European city unfortunate enough to be an EasyJet destination. Little did I realise that New Year's Eve in Milan would make your average Scottish Hogmanay street party look like afternoon tea at the Women's Institute...

I took the (inappropriately named) Malpensa Express back into town and celebrated being back in Italy by eating focaccia for lunch. A few of my friends were already back and we had been planning to go out for a meal, but when we realised that the price of a set menu was around 80 euros and all the restaurants were either closed or fully booked two of my friends decided to organise a pizza making party at their house.

After the pizza, we packed a bottle of “champagne” and some cartons of cheap wine in our bags and headed out. The streets were surprisingly quiet, apart from a few guys setting off fireworks down a side street near the bus stop.

That all changed when we got to the Duomo. Even as we emerged from the metro, we could hear loud bangs exploding overhead. We looked up to the sky, expecting to see colourful displays of fireworks, but there were none. Just the cathedral, the Christmas tree, groups of people hanging around and a whole lot of smoke. And what we heard were earth-shattering bangs that shook our nerves and seemed to shake the historic cathedral to its foundation stones.

What in fact was happening was that the groups of people were setting off firecrackers. Big ones. And they were throwing them into the piazza, at each other, and in the direction of anyone who happened to be standing nearby. The few policemen who were actually present were cowering under their riot gear and doing very little.

How dangerous the firecrackers actually were I do not know, but the explosions were certainly big enough to be terrifying. Normally any street party in Italy is filled with families and people of all ages, but this was mainly groups of young men for whom a buggy with a baby in it, a dog or the inside of a moving tram was as good a target as anything else.

We escaped from the Piazza del Duomo as quickly as possible, hiding from the blasts under the arches of the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele. We tried to find a safer route across the piazza using the metro station, but people were throwing the firecrackers down the exits too. Eventually we made it out and headed towards the castle. Outside the castle the situation was the same, but this time with the added interest of the traffic.

Luckily some of my friends were braver than I was and decided that we should investigate what was going on in the park behind the castle, where there was supposed to be an actual fireworks display. The park was beautiful. There was thick snow on the ground and the trees made wintry silhouettes against the frosty sky. Bars in log cabins were selling mulled wine and apple strudel. We didn't have to wait long before the fireworks display started and, in its snowy setting, it was spectacular. It went on for almost half an hour, with the fireworks getting bigger and more impressive every time, until they seemed to burst towards us, filling all the visible sky. We drank the sparkling wine and toasted the new year in English and Italian. We even did a very loud but somewhat mumbled version of Auld Lang Syne, which was cheerful even if nobody else knew any of the words beyond the first line. And that was my new year!

Felice anno nuovo a tutti!